The present invention relates generally to the field of audio response automation, and more specifically, to the field of providing customized, billing-controlled call bridging services.
It is considered well known that significant economic advantages can often be realized by replacing manual systems with automated systems since the cost of human labor is very high. In the telecommunications world, human operators have long been vital links in completing certain types of calls, including collect calls, third-party calls, and person-to-person calls. However, the high costs of human labor associated with providing human operator assistance is very undesirable for most telephone service carriers.
Also, it is often desirable to control call billing options in certain types of telephone customer environments. In the penal environment, for example, the propensity for billing fraud, such as billing a call to an unauthorized number or credit account, is very high. In order to reduce the likelihood of billing fraud, it is frequently advantageous to permit inmates to make only collect calls. Many prior telephone systems handle all penal calls identically and tend to provide too much human operator involvement or billing functionality for penal environments, thus failing to take full advantage of the special needs and characteristics of penal environments.
Since prisoners often have abundant amounts of free time on their hands, inmate telephone privileges frequently provide inmates with opportunities for making nuisance calls to other parties, as well as to the live operators. Also, prison officials routinely need to record telephone conversations of selected prisoners. Few, if any, prior telephones systems provide features for effectively preventing nuisance calls and recording selected prisoner conversations.
There is, therefore, a need in the industry for a customized, billing-controlled call bridging system which addresses these and other related, and unrelated, problems.